s cold
outlines, the familiar things and scenes which he had so loved as a
scout. The hill trail was nothing but a dotted line, but Tom knew it for
more than that, for it was along its winding way into the dark recesses
of the mountains that he had qualified for the pathfinder's badge. Black
Lake was just an irregular circle, but in his mind's eye he saw there
the moonlight glinting up the water, and canoes gliding silently, and
heard the merry voices of scouts diving from the springboard at its
edge.

He liked this map better than maps of billets and trenches, and to him
the hill trail was more suggestive of adventure than the Hindenburg
Line. He had been very close to the Hindenburg Line and it had meant no
more to him than the equator. He had found the war to be like a
three-ringed circus--it was too big. Temple Camp was about the right
size.

Tom reached for a slip of paper and laying it upon the map just where
the trail went over the hilltop and off the camp territory altogether,
jotted down the numbers of three cabins which were indicated by little
squares.

"They're the only three together and kind of separate," he said to
himself.

Then he went over to the window and gazed out upon the busy scene, which
the city office of Temple Camp overlooked. He did this, not because
there was anything there which he wished particularly to see, but
because he contemplated doing something and was in some perplexity
about it. He was going to dictate a letter to Miss Margaret Ellison, the
stenographer.

Tom had seen cannons and machine guns and hand grenades and depth bombs,
but the thing in all this world that he was most afraid of was the long
sharply pointed pencil which Miss Margaret Ellison always held poised
above her open note book, waiting to record his words. Tom had always
fallen down at the last minute and told her what he wanted to say;
suggesting that she say it in her own sweet way. He did not say _sweet_
way, though he may have thought it.

So now he stood at the open window looking down upon Bridgeboro's
surging thoroughfare, while the breath of Spring permeated the Temple
Camp office. If he had been less susceptible of this gentle influence in
the very air, he would still have known it was Spring by the things in
the store windows across the way--straw hats and hammocks and tennis
rackets. There were moving vans, too, with furniture bulging out behind
them, which are just as certain signs of merry May a